Shared housing is a rather unusual phenomenon in Sweden. However, due to the decreasing availability of affordable housing and a large share of single-person households in urban areas, sharing is on the rise and new forms of shared housing have entered the market. By analysing how shared housing overlaps with existing patterns of socioeconomic segregation and by interviewing developers of diverse forms of shared housing in the cities of Stockholm and Malmö, this article aims to evolve the understanding of sharing housing from a perspective on housing inequality. We find that while many households are sharing housing because there are no other options, others share because they have the possibility to share certain spaces and facilities, which makes life easier and enhances a sense of togetherness. While the first category is concentrated in marginalized and racialized areas of the cities, the other category is concentrated in well-off areas. Developers offering shared solutions in marginalized areas are few but do so based on a discourse of ‘receiving less for more’, while developers offering shared housing in wealthier districts are doing so based on ‘sustainability’ and ‘making life easier’, as the shared housing includes private facilities and services that aim to support an effortless lifestyle in districts with existing urban assets. The conclusion is that sharing housing is no longer solely built on community spirit and de-growth, but sharing housing is also a reflection of contemporary housing inequality.

 I denna vänbok hyllar och uppmärksammar vi en alldeles särskild person – Tapio Salonen, professor i socialt arbete. Tapios forskning tar ställning och söker att göra skillnad; den tar ställning för den ’lilla människan’ och ger sig i kast med de samhällsstrukturer, den politik, de myndigheter och de praktiker som bidrar till att samhällsklyftor upprätthålls eller ökar. Genom att reflektera och analysera i linje med Tapio Salonens forskargärning presenteras forskning som rör samspelet mellan individ och samhälle.

Bokens kapitel lyfter exempel på hur vi kan förstå individen i samhället och samhället i individen; hur individens liv formas – begränsas och frigörs – av samhällets strukturer. Frågan: Varför skärper vi oss inte? riktar strålkastarljuset mot hur individen problematiseras och pressas till att ändra sig, även när problemen snarare återfinns i samhällsstrukturen, i dess politik, organisationer och praktiker, vilket inte minst inkluderar socialt arbete som politik- och praktikområde. Här har Tapio Salonens forskningsinsatser genom åren varit omfattande och haft genomslag som de flesta av oss bara drömmer om. Så, hur kan vi alla bli mer som Tapio? Bokens författare, som samtliga haft Tapio som handledare under sin forskarutbildning, gör här utifrån sina olika forskningsområden ett samlat försök att med hela handen peka i vilken riktning vi bör gå. Ett första steg är att öppna ögonen för de strukturer som styr våra liv, och då är denna bok en oumbärlig guide. Det andra steget är att utforska hur ojämlikhet i samhället inte är en slump, utan snarare resultatet av olika aktörers medvetna val.

Boken vänder sig till såväl politiker, praktiker och studenter som den som är intresserad av sociala frågor i bred bemärkelse. Läs och lär, för att förstå och förändra. Låt den här boken bli ett verktyg på resan mot en insiktsfull och jämlik framtid!

In this short introductory article, we summarise the contributions to the second part of the special issue on publicand social rental housing in the Nordic countries. We also emphasise that the journal is happy to consider scientificpapers for publication from across the Nordic region addressing the most pressing housing-related questions ofthe day. As inequality has been on the rise throughout the previously so egalitarian Nordics in recent decades, westrongly encourage researchers to submit papers that situate housing markets and housing policies in the widerdebate and empirical research on inequality.

Municipal public housing is one of the pillars of the Swedish national housing regime, which is often understood asbeing universal in the sense that the national housing policy is directed towards the whole population, not merelyfiltering for financially vulnerable households. Much research has analysed this rather unique housing sector,focusing on how incremental policy changes during the last four decades have changed the role and significanceof public housing. This paper aims to give a current review of the state of public housing, and builds on existingresearch and a quantitative analysis of recent data on housing construction and socioeconomic development. Itidentifies two contradictions of central concern for contemporary public housing and sets those contradictions inrelation to the historical aims of the national housing regime. First, it analyses the large number of public housingunits constructed during the last decade, which is contrasted with a parallel trend of decreased public housingstock. Second, the paper identifies a “dual selectivity”, where public housing on the one hand has turned towardswell-off households through strict requirements on new tenants and expensive newly constructed housing; and onthe other hand, an increasing residualization implying that increasingly the public housing sector is the sole optionfor low-income households who cannot access other tenures. Given these contradictions and the acute demand forhousing solutions for households with low income, the article concludes with a discussion of the shape of Swedishpublic housing to come.

The significance of cities as concentrations of political and economic power can hardly beoverstated. Cities project power on the global stage and are recognized as powerful actorsby others: anchoring revolutions and giving their names to historical epochs and intellectualtraditions (Chicago or Frankfurt) and even phases of economic development. The power of thecity on the historical and global stages makes it even more important to study and grasp theway urban power is conceived, constructed, contested and exercised within and between cities.The premise of the chapter is that cities, urban arenas and urbanization dynamics remaincrucial sources of power and governing resources today, though the perspectives we discussdiverge radically in their claims, and the significance they impart to urban governance.Urban Studies has become a truly global interdisciplinary field, through which perspectiveson power and urban governance have multiplied and diversified. The chapter introduces keytraditions, exploring three distinct and internally differentiated bodies of thought: Marxism,neo-institutionalism and post-colonialism. It begins by discussing prominent traditions withinor related to urban Marxism: state theory, planetary urbanism and horizontalist approaches. Itthen discusses recent institutionalist perspectives, finally considering the growing influence ofpost-colonial perspectives questioning dominant ‘northern’ accounts of the city and urbanity.The chapter concludes by suggesting pathways for future research.

Residents' perceived safety is key to improving livelihoods and reducing disparities between neighborhoods in Sweden. Neighborhood interventions may be more cost-effective than individual-level interventions in addressing major societal issues such as unequal levels of safety between neighborhoods. However, most studies investigating the impact of neighborhood characteristics on perceived safety suffer from either poor data quality, too few respondents per statistical unit, large units of analysis, or a lack of longitudinally collected data. This study aims to fill this gap by combining property-specific longitudinal sociodemographic data with customer satisfaction survey data (N = 147,965) collected between 2013-2014 and 2016-2021 in Gothenburg. Using two multilevel models, we examined the relationship between perceived safety and both property-level and arealevel structural characteristics, testing three hypotheses. Consistent with prior research, we find that sociodemographic and urban environmental characteristics influenced perceptions of safety. The multilevel analyses reveal that proximity to the square is associated with lower levels of perceived safety, particularly among residents living within 0-100 m of the square in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Moreover, the results show that living in taller buildings of 10-16 floors is associated with lower levels of safety.

Sweden is a country with an international reputation for gender equality. The political goal of gender equality is based on feminist analysis of what constitutes a just society according to gender and the fight against patriarchal norms. Despite policy recommendations and legislation that counteract discrimination against women, women still fear traveling by public transport and being out in the evenings. This indicates that Swedish society still has patriarchal norms to deal with. The article is based on qualitative interviews and data retrieved from the Swedish National Statistics, SCB. The interviews explored mobility practices and strategies, experiences with different modes of transport, and reliability, affordability, and comfort of the mobility options available. The results shows that travel choices for women are affected by their concerns about safety and related necessary adaptation to situations identified as threatening. Despite the "mythical mantra" of the gender equal society, Sweden share the patriarchal norms with other countries, that delimits women's use and access to public space and public transport.

How can struggles for housing justice act as a lens to expand housingresearchers’ understanding of the rental crisis and of the systems thatunderpin this crisis? By presenting papers from Sweden, Spain,Greece, the UK, and Australia this special issue contributes withknowledge on how housing struggles can inform new theoreticaland methodological approaches within the field of housing studies.In turn, the SI presents three tenets that together form a frameworkfor housing scholars: institutionalization as politics, tenants as poli-tical actors, and learning housing justice. We argue that it is crucialfor housing scholars to recenter on struggles for housing justice intheir readings of contemporary housing systems.

Through the concepts of temporal racism and racial capitalism, this articleexplores how time is racialized in Swedish unemployment projects, shapinga racialized and gendered division of labor. The article identifies three formsof temporal racism practices: temporal racism through the invisibilization ofwork, through waiting, and through wasting. I argue that these practices oftemporal racism create diverse forms of labor and are therefore importantfactors in the production and reproduction of racial capitalism. Temporalracism deprives those defined as ‘foreign-born unemployed women’ of timefor joy, pleasure, community, and family; instead, it ensures that their time isused to transform them into racialized workers, moving between precariousemployment and surplus populations.

Utställningen Allmänningen handlar om våra gemensamma rum. De torg, stråk och gröningar dit allmänheten idag har tillträde. Mellan tätort och landsbygd, längs med åar och vattendrag, via våtmarker och kulturminnesplatser, över höjder och ängsmarker. Det är platser för demokrati, kulturellt utbyte, handel och rekreation.

I utställningen Allmänningen möts historiska spår, planerare och några nedgrävda kartor. Genom olika kartläggningspraktiker som rör sig mellan plats och representation visas hur allmänningen som fenomen har transformerats över tid. Den har genomgått ett antal olika förändringar och människor har trots dessa skiften alltid tagit platser i anspråk: gröningar, gator, parker, stråk, torg – på landsbygd, i tätort, längs med åar och vattendrag, via våtmarker och kulturminnesplatser, över höjder och ängsmarker. Det är platser för demokrati, kulturellt utbyte, handel och vila. 

Här presenteras allmänningen som ett begrepp, som fysisk plats och kulturell enhet. Från kroppens intima skala till värderingen och regleringen av mark. 

Utställningen är kopplad till forskningsprojektet Allmänningar och stråk för rumslig rättvisa i urban fullåkersbygd finansierat av forskningsrådet FORMAS.

Across the different vernaculars of the world's urban majorities, there is renewed bewilderment as to what is going on in the cities in which they reside and frequently self-build. Prices are unaffordable and they are either pushed out or strongly lured away from central locations. Work is increasingly temporary, if available at all, and there is often just too much labour involved to keep lives viably in place. Not only do they look for affordability and new opportunities in increasingly distant suburbs and hinterlands, but for orientations, for ways of reading where things are heading, increasingly hedging their bets across multiple locations and affiliations. Coming together to write this piece from our own multiple orientations, we are eight researchers who, over the past year, joined to consider how variegated trajectories of expansion unsettle the current logic of city-making. We have used the notion of extensions as a way of thinking about operating in the middle of things, as both a reflection of and a way of dealing with this unsettling. An unsettling that disrupts clear designations of points of departure and arrival, movement and settlement, centre and periphery, and time and space

Den långvariga bostadskrisen i Sverige har gjort tillgången på bostäder allt mer begränsad på hyresmarknaden och allt dyrare gällande det ägda boendet. Samtidigt har osäkra och tillfälliga anställningsformer ökat i Sverige sedan 1990-talet. Både dessa trender ökar utan tvekan otryggheten i det dagliga livet för en växande andel av svenska hushåll. 

Denna rapport fokuserar på en central, men ofta förbisedd, aspekt av bostadsmarknaden, nämligen det ägda boendet. Mer specifikt redogör rapporten för bolånemarknaden i Sverige och undersöker villkoren och möjligheterna för de med osäkra anställningar i synnerhet. Rapportens övergripande syfte är att undersöka vilka aktörer och möjligheter dessa ställs inför i strävan efter ett ägt boende, och hur deras situation skiljer sig åt jämfört med dem med fasta anställningar.

Vidare diskuterar vi några kritiska konsekvenser av den ökade finansiella inkluderingen av atypiskt sysselsatta på bolånemarknaden, något som inte har blivit adresserat av existerande forskning. Materialet består bland annat av rapporter från Riksbanken, Finansinspektionen, bankers årsredovisningar, offentliga rapporter och relevanta aktörers hemsidor. Utöver det återfinns material från intervjuer (N = 13) med bankrepresentanter vi genomfört under 2023. 

In this contribution, we analyse the parliamentary minutes debating the issue of women’s voting rights in Sweden from the start of the two-chamber parliament in 1866 until 1918, when women were finally granted voting rights on the same terms as men. We find that most arguments belonged to one of two broad categories: those that were against women’s suffrage as a matter of principle, and those that could accept women’s right to vote but not at the present time. The arguments of principle were without exception used by conservatives, and while some liberals did occasionally use postponement arguments, this was also the realm of conservative argumentation. Not a single social democrat argued against female voting rights in the analysed minutes. Furthermore, we find that the conservative arguments of principle were remarkably stable and essentially did not change during the 52 years our analysis covers. The postponement arguments varied more over time as some of the more common ones, such as the need for further investigation, lost credibility. 

Policy mobility literature invites us to consider the power-laden processes of how urban policies are exported, mimicked, and transformed in different urban contexts. However, recent critique has highlighted the need for a fuller understanding of urban policy context to understand where and when policies come to be implemented in new settings and how they are transformed. The purpose of this study is to explore understandings of urban policy context in a comparative study of policy mobility, and specifically relations between internationally packaged concepts, local pilot projects and national level actors. We develop a framework for understanding these relations in policy mobility based on case studies of BID policy development in Sweden and Denmark drawing on both Policy Mobility literature and a Multiple Streams Approach. The main finding is that local pilots play a key role in translating packaged policy concepts but also serve as ‘proof of concept’ for further institutionalization. The way these pilots are discursively situated in relation to ‘problems’ is therefore of central importance for further implementation. Furthermore, the study highlights the role of policy entrepreneurs that connect local pilots (and discursive problems) with national level actors, and political opportunities.

The study of yield gaps has become more complex, prompting the use of varied approaches to measure yields and a wider range of factors to explain these gaps. In the Global North, the focus is on precision farming, whereas in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), a broader perspective is necessary due to pronounced variability in farmland conditions. While biogeophysical and management factors have been traditional focal points in yield gap analyses, socio-economic and institutional factors are increasingly recognized as significant, especially in SSA. This review synthesizes research from the past decade in SSA that integrates biogeophysical, management, farm characteristics, and institutional factors in yield gap discussions. The findings indicate a slow shift in including socio-economic factors, with management, particularly nutrient supply and crop management, remaining predominant. However, there is a growing trend towards methodological diversity, such as the adoption of remote sensing and GIS in recent years. Case studies from Kenya and Ghana, utilizing field surveys, interviews, panel data, and spatial analysis, highlight how a multifaceted approach can enhance our understanding of the various elements influencing maize yield gaps in SSA.

In this chapter, the authors discuss the historical development and the current state of the housing and welfare regimes in the Nordic countries, using Sweden and Norway as our main cases. The two neighbouring countries on the Scandinavian peninsula are often classified as generous social democratic welfare regimes with a high level of universalism and de-commodification. In the first postwar decades, however, Sweden and Norway chose different paths in the sphere of housing policy. In Sweden, there are four main forms of tenure. Ownership rights (owner-occupied housing) are mainly enjoyed in single-family houses. The Norwegian housing regime is a liberal and selective sector of what is still a generous welfare regime with many universal benefits and services. Sweden and Norway both experienced a gradual “system shift” in housing policy in the 1980s, 1990s and after the millennium. 

This article analyses actor relationships in Transit Oriented Development (TOD) planning in order to better understand the preconditions necessary for planning processes to result in TOD in lower density contexts, in suburbs, or small cities. Empirically, the analysis builds on a comparative case study of TOD planning projects. The focus in the analytical work is on understanding how market conditions in lower density contexts influence the conditions for TOD planning projects, and how this feeds through to planning processes. The overall conclusion is that we should not expect that planning processes in small cities with low to medium densities of populations and activities differ much from those in more ‘classic’ highly urban TOD locations. Market conditions had an impact on planning processes, but once in the planning stage conditions for implementation depended more on the ability to handle competing interests and less on market conditions. In terms of policy recommendations, it is important for actors to develop a joint vision of the built environment of the site in question that channels organizations’ individual actions in a joint direction. The ability to achieve such a joint vision for the design of the site in question may be more important in small towns than in more ‘typical’ TOD contexts in denser urban areas. This is because all enablers need to work together in a positive way in such location – which may be marginal from a market point of view – for the development to be able to go ahead.

Protracted economic crises, accelerating inequalities, and increased resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often require residents to draw on their own resources, knowledge, and expertise to resolve these life and livelihood dilemmas.

DIY Urbanism in Africa investigates these practices. It develops a theoretical framework through which to analyze them, and it presents a series of case studies to demonstrate how residents invent new DIY tactics and strategies in response to security, place-making, or economic problems.

This book offers a timely critical intervention into literatures on urban development and politics in Africa. It is valuable to students, policymakers, and urban practitioners keen to understand the mechanisms and political implications of widespread dynamics now shaping Africa's expanding urban environments.

This paper lays the ground for a novel discussion on the encounter between José Martí and Antonio Gramsci. It argues that Martí and Gramsci can be profitably and innovatively read together when interrogating the profound “spatial articulations” that animate their political vision. The discussion principally focuses on Martí's concept of Our America and Gramsci's Southern Question. Methodologically, the article deploys a “diachronic tactic” that mobilises a broad body of literature that emerged long after Martí's and Gramsci's lives, particularly considering contributions within Radical Geography and Postcolonial Studies. 

Studies on rental housing financialisation have blossomed over the last decade. Studies are often concerned with issues around affordability and displacement, while less focus has been on how financialisation reconfigures the materials of housing, home, and the residential environment by subordinating maintenance to aggressive and unsustainable renovation strategies. We look at the case of Sweden and zoom in on a working-class Stockholm suburb where part of the housing stock is owned by the German, publicly listed real estate company Vonovia. We discuss how national and international regulations remain insufficient in ensuring that every day and structural maintenance is conducted properly by financialised landlords, leaving tenants stuck with delayed and poor-quality repair and replacement work as well as insufficient communication, severely affecting their quality of life. We propose to discuss the concepts of “housing as infrastructure” to account for these complex consequences. 

Through a case study of an immigrant dense working-class neighborhood in Berlin, this article asks how racial and territorial stigmatization figure into state-enabled financialized gentrification and resistance against it. While there is a discussion on territorial stigmatization in the gentrification literature, this debate remains understated in the emerging financialized gentrification literature and rarely connects to race. Debates on resistance to financialization, in turn, while being attuned to the detrimental effects of stigmatization on struggle, pay little attention to the role of the local state as a producer of stigma. In this article I draw together debates on financialization, state-enabled gentrification and racial and territorial stigma to suggest that the local state, through its oppressive classifications and racialized representations of urban space, contributes to preparing the symbolic and material structures on which finance capital is able to flourish, not only by normalizing displacement, but by hampering resistance and demobilizing local working-class communities.

The purpose of this article is to problematize working-class literature’s biographical representation model, that is, the widespread thought model according to which the political potential of working-class literature is dependent on the authors having a strong biographical connection to the working-class collectives they portray. This problematization, which takes its point of departure in an analysis of the reception of two literary works about the so-called precariat — Anders Teglund’s Cykelbudet [The Bicycle Courier] (2021) and Kristian Lundberg’s Yarden [The Yard] (2009) — is both theoretical and historical. Drawing on the Marxist distinction between class in itself and class for itself, the article argues that the so-called precariat has not developed any common way of life or class conciousness that the authors could share. This is thematized in several contemporary literary depictions of precarious working conditions, which can therefore be read as an implicit criticism of working-class literature’s biographical representation model. The article also demonstrates that this model rests on a false picture of the tradition of working-class literature. Older working-class writers have not always had such a strong biographical anchorage in working-class life worlds as critics and literary researchers usually assume (and as the writers themselves have sometimes claimed). On the other hand, they have often, through their participation in the labor movement and its literary life, had an ideological/political connection to this class. Many of the contemporary authors who depict the so-called precariat also have political connections to the collectives they write about, in the form of involvement in organizations that fight against precarious working conditions. Therefore, the article argues that it can be fruitful to focus more on the ideological partisanship of writers portraying workers than on their biographical anchoring in the life worlds of these collectives.

Throughout prehistory, earthen architecture has played a pivotal role in establishing a sustainable and easily maintainable built environment, showcasing humanity's capacity to design and construct intricate structures using eco-friendly and cost-effective materials. This special issue underscores the enduring significance of earthen architecture in our historical and contemporary understanding of sustainable building practices.

In this introduction, we briefly present the idea behind this special issue on public and social rental housing in the Nordic countries. We emphasize that empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of key aspects of social and public housing is crucial for policymakers and others seeking to grasp the challenges, opportunities, and dilemmas in the field of housing in the northernmost part of Europe. In the introduction, we also outline the cross-national varieties in the Nordic region when it comes to social and public rental housing, suggest a broad working definition of social rental housing, and summarize the main points of the articles published in part one of the special issue. As social scientists interested in comparative studies and international collaboration, we regard this special issue as a small step or even a new beginning for Nordic housing research that has comparative ambitions or is at least aware of theoretical debates and significant developments in neighbouring countries.

In this chapter, editors Martin Grander and Mark Stephens draw conclusions on the changes in housing and welfare regimes based on the empirical findings from the countries explored in the previous chapters. The chapter shows that both housing and welfare systems – regardless of their earlier constitution – have changed markedly in terms of income inequality and housing accessibility due to processes such as marketization and income polarization. Inequalities in both housing and welfare have in some countries been reinforced during the last decade by migration and everywhere by the COVID-19 pandemic. The current economic crisis continues to exacerbate such inequalities as inflation and increasing interest rates tend to place a disproportionate strain on low-income households. The chapter shows how the development of the national housing policy is driven by policies of fiscal consolidation, rather than welfare state development. This development calls for a more in-depth analysis of the interrelation between housing and the wider welfare state, which also includes the sphere of finance.

This chapter addresses the embeddedness of housing in the wider welfare regime. Through an analytical framework constructed on the basis of earlier research and empirical findings from previous chapters in the book, editors Martin Grander and Mark Stephens develop the theoretical understanding of the embeddedness of housing in the wider welfare regime. The chapter connects the changes in the global housing and welfare regimes described in the previous chapter to the previous understanding of the housing-welfare nexus. The authors start by examining the countries’ wider welfare regimes, and then the housing regimes, first within the context of Kemeny’s typology of housing regimes, and then within the framework based on previous work by Stephens, where housing is examined through the spheres of production, consumption and exchange. Finally, the two perspectives are drawn together. By such an application the authors contribute to an updated understanding of how housing can be understood and analysed as part of the welfare state.

In this chapter, Martin Grander and Mark Stephens discuss the current academic understanding of how housing interlocks with welfare. The chapter problematises models that seek to analyse housing and welfare in tandem, building on the literature on decreasing housing affordability, more limited access to housing, and increasing housing inequality. Based on this literature – and on recent critiques of the housing-welfare regime framework from housing scholars – the authors argue for an updated empirically grounded understanding of the relationship. The chapter presents a framework for an updated, understanding of the interrelation, developing Kemeny’s theories and the current paradigm of analysing housing systems from a comparative welfare state perspective. As the authors argue, such a developed understanding needs to be based on empirical data on housing and welfare from different contexts, which evidently have undergone important changes in recent decades.

In this concluding chapter, editors Martin Grander and Mark Stephens summarise the findings and reflect on the evolution of regime approaches as theoretical frameworks for understanding housing systems. The central thesis is that the housing regime operates within a wider welfare regime that incorporates both micro- and macro- social and economic institutions. Identifying the interrelationships between the housing and wider welfare regimes is key to understanding how housing systems operate, and what policy can – and cannot – achieve. Interpreting welfare regimes and housing regimes, and the relationship between them has become more complex as the world has become more integrated; it has become simply impossible to understand housing systems solely from within. Neither merely describing institutional frameworks and policies nor categorising them on the basis of the role of the state, market and households will provide a satisfactory explanation. Understanding requires capturing organisational logic, which is itself more difficult as traditional ideologies and party systems are weakened, although the significance of legacy regimes remains.

In this chapter, the basic concepts of housing and welfare are clarified by editors Martin Grander and Mark Stephens. The notions of welfare regimes and housing regimes are defined and elaborated, discussing the distributional logic of welfare and housing in different contexts. The chapter discusses the basis for Esping-Andersen’s classic typology of welfare regimes as well as more recent developments, critiques, and alternative understandings of such a categorization. Regarding housing, the authors first introduce how comparative approaches to theorize housing have mirrored approaches more closely focused on welfare states. Here, the “housing-welfare regime” framework, founded by Kemeny, serves as the main point of departure. Thus, the chapter introduces and summarizes the two principal articulations of regime theory as applied to the welfare state and to housing, as well as the key studies that preceded them. It also highlights the political and economic context in which these regimes were created in the 20th century and how this has changed under the pressures of economic globalization and political fragmentation. The chapter also demonstrates how regime theory has bifurcated between housing and the wider welfare state and this inevitably inhibits our ability to understand the relationship between them, particularly in a changing world.

The introductory chapter, written by editors Martin Grander and Mark Stephens, introduces the housing question as one of the most pressing issues of societal importance in recent decades. The authors summarize the problems of global housing markets in terms of accessibility, affordability, and residential segregation and argue that a deeper understanding of such problems requires the interrelationship between housing and welfare to be addressed. The authors argue for the application of “welfare regimes”, as proposed by Gøsta Esping-Andersen, which makes it possible to commence a deeper analysis in which distinctive housing systems can emerge in parallel to such wider welfare systems. The chapter shows that Jim Kemeny’s analysis of the relationship between welfare and housing regimes has recently been contested by both empirical and theoretical research. It is therefore argued that there is a need to revisit the connection between housing and welfare, considering changes in both the wider welfare regimes and housing systems. Thus, the aim of the book is introduced – to provide an empirically grounded and theoretically updated perspective of how welfare regimes relate to housing systems from the 2020s onwards.

The housing question has always been topical in Russia. Over the past 30 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has developed a functioning real estate and construction sector in a market economy. The tenure structure of the Russian housing stock should be analyzed in relation to the ownership structure. The contemporary tenure structure in Russia has been largely determined by the mass giveaway privatization of public (state and municipal) housing following the demise of the Soviet Union. The social housing sector in Russia is rather small and based on the non-privatized portion of Soviet-era public housing. The historical evolution of the housing regime in contemporary Russia has been determined by the legacy of the 70-year period of state socialism, a decade of socio-economic turbulence following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the transition to a market economy, as well as the economic rebound in the 2000s.

This handbook takes on one of the most pressing issues of today’s society – the question of housing. It is a cutting-edge edited volume about the disputed interrelationship between housing and the wider welfare state. Although housing scholars generally agree that housing should be regarded as part of such a wider welfare system, it has proven hard to pinpoint and operationalize its position within it. Moreover, the relationship became considerably more complex as a result of the period of intense globalization and the integration of national housing finance systems into world finance markets. Furthermore, welfare systems reflect economic as well as social models and these, too, have changed as countries have responded to globalization, and traditional ideological frameworks have become less distinct.

Thus, there is a need to redefine the connection between housing and welfare in light of changes in both welfare and housing systems. By investigating the current situation and historical development of housing provision and welfare distribution in different contexts worldwide, this book aims to contribute to an expanded understanding of housing and welfare.

The book brings together 25 international housing researchers covering 15 countries worldwide. With such a global approach, the book aims to provide an updated empirical picture and analysis of different housing systems and their connection to the welfare regime in different national contexts. The book moves beyond the usual focus on affordable housing provision in the context of well-developed welfare regimes and includes countries from the global south, incorporating regions where it is debatable whether there are welfare systems present at all. Thus, the book aims to provide the reader with an insight into the large differences in housing provision in international contexts with large differences regarding how the welfare state is comprised. From these insights, we reflect on whether regime approaches continue to provide a suitable theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between housing and the wider welfare state.

This handbook is essential reading for researchers, students, policymakers, and other professionals in the fields of housing studies, welfare studies, economics, urban studies, social work, social and public policy, and sociology.

Denna vetenskapliga rapport är ett kunskapsunderlag framtaget för Tillväxtkommissionen för ett inkluderande och hållbart Malmö.

Kommunstyrelsen i Malmö beslutade i oktober 2020 att tillsätta Tillväxtkommissionen, som är politiskt oberoende. Målet med kommissionens arbete är att ge kommunstyrelsen ett analytiskt och vetenskapligt grundat underlag med förslag för att på medellång och lång sikt förbättra förutsättningar för en inkluderande och hållbar tillväxt i Malmö. Förslagen och rekommendationerna ska vara policydrivande och realiserbara. Kommissionen ska analysera förutsättningarna för hållbar tillväxt i Malmö och utifrån Malmös utmaningar analysera orsaker och samband samt identifiera vad som är påverkbart av vem/vilka och hur.

Författarna till kunskapsunderlagsrapporterna är ansvariga för innehållet i sina rapporter. De slutsatser, förslag och rekommendationer som redovisas i rapporterna behöver inte vara de som kommer att redovisas i Tillväxtkommissionens slutrapport. I slutrapporten kommer helhetsbilden, baserad på samtliga underlag, andra relevanta rapporter och analyser och dialog med olika aktörer, att styra vad kommissionen till slut anser vara mest angeläget att föreslå för att åstadkomma en inkluderande och hållbar tillväxt i Malmö. 

The article addresses the simple but pertinent question of why ambitious urban planning visions slowly lose a significant share of their aims during the implementation phase and why there often occurs a significant time span between vision and implementation. Using the development of the deindustrialised Norra Sorgenfri neighbourhood in central Malmö, Sweden, as an example, the author enquires into why developing the area became so complicated, and why the original vision, with its focus on social sustainability, largely disappeared despite private developers having invested in land acquisition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Based on document analysis of the vision for Norra Sorgenfri from 2006 and the subsequent planning programme from 2008, as well as interviews with planners and property developers, this article seeks to highlight the mechanisms due to which the implementation of the Norra Sorgenfri plans differs from original visions and strategies, as well as examine why the process was so slow. The authors conclude that the planning office’s ‘visioning’ becomes powerless in the face of ‘property-led regeneration’ where private developers have most of the decision-making power, and that the ‘social sustainability’ ideal cannot be achieved through physical regeneration alone. 

A fair distribution of accessibility to key activities is a central concern for distributive justice in transport planning. This implies that disparities in accessibility and the negative effects associated with a lack of accessibility should be mitigated. However, even though accessibility is not purely spatial or static, it is conventionally treated as if it were. Several studies have significantly advanced the spatio-temporal representation of accessibility. However, there is still a lack of focus on how these dynamics affect different groups of people with differing socio-economic and demographic characteristics and how these dynamics might influence their travel mode choice. The aim of this paper is to analyse how differences in accessibility to the workplace by public transport during multiple times of the day are associated with the time period in which different groups of people commute to work, and how the flexibility of individuals' time constraints might influence whether they can and do commute using public transport. Using a transport justice-focused time geography perspective, this study draws on the spatio-temporal aspects of people's real activities based on travel survey data for the Stockholm Region. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the differences in accessibility to the workplace by public transport across multiple departure time periods; showing how these results compare with mode choice (if there is a choice); and revealing which socio-economic, demographic and geographical factors characterise these differences. This study also illustrates how a transport justice-focused time geography approach could help researchers have a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the relationship between accessibility and sustainable travel behaviour, and how this relationship might change at different times of the day.

So called ‘smart’ built environments operate in a peculiar temporal nexus: they are simultaneously just around the corner, already here, and yesterday’s news. This is usually put down to hype and hyperbole, but it may well be argued that smart built environments do indeed exist across temporal dimensions – only not in the way we imagine them to.

Instead of speaking of a digital turn in housing, we would be better served by employing the plural: digital turns. In fact, once we begin to unravel the history of how the idea of what we today call smart technology has been implemented in multi-household rental dwellings since the early 1980s, a pattern emerges.

The article charts how landlords and others have placed smart devices that monitor, encourage or discipline tenants to behave in certain ways. This is a parallel story to the dream of a leisure-centred technology-enabled house of the future. This parallel story is darker and centres on the transformation of the dwelling through its digitalisation.

Den här rapporten tar upp en central aspekt kring allmännyttans roll på den svenska bostadsmarknaden, nämligen vilka krav och regler som påverkar vilka som får tillträde till dessa bostäder. Allmännyt­tans särställning som en garant för en generell tillgång till bra bostäder för alla avgörs i praktiken av lokala regler hos de kommunala allmännyttiga bostadsbolagen.

Rapporten presenterar en systematisk uppföljning år 2022 av en tidigare rikstäckande undersökning från 2013 kring lokala tillträdeskrav och syftar till att följa upp tillträdeskraven i den svenska allmännyttiga bostadssektorn med fokus på förändringar i kraven mellan åren 2013–2022 samt möjliga orsaker till sådana förändringar. Undersökningen har genomförts inom ramen för det Formas-finansierade projektet “Allmännyttan och blandningspolitikens praktik” (2018–2023), som har syftat till att skapa en fördjupad kunskap om allmännyttans roll på svensk bostadsmarknad, särskilt när det gäller dess funktion att medverka till en allsidig sammansättning av hushåll i kommunerna.

Flera intres­santa skillnader i kraven framträder i jämförel­sen. En första slutsats är att kravet på inkomst har sänkts och förändrat karaktär i många av de kommunala bostadsföretagen. En andra slutsats är att andra typer av krav, som kan sammanfattas som skötsamhetskrav, har blivit vanligare. Utifrån denna iakttagelse går det att resone­ra om huruvida det är samma krav som ställs men i en annorlunda utformning. Mycket ty­der på att det är samma grupper som stängs ute från de kommunala hyresmarknaden 2022 som 2013. Sammantaget ger denna studie vid handen att trösklarna fortsatt är höga in på den allmännyttiga hyresmarknaden, vilket i sin tur begränsar möjligheterna för vissa grupper av hushåll på den svenska bostadsmarknaden i allmänhet. Det finns fortfarande finns en ”omvänd selektivitet” i svensk allmännytta, det vill säga att allmännyttan i många kommuner vänder sig främst till de hushåll som har goda ekonomiska och sociala resurser, snarare än de som har det sämst ställt.

Many island municipalities depend upon the tourist industry, but this industry can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provides a source of income to people in the region, using the natural resources they have. On the other hand, the low-skill services that are connected to tourism have low wages and productivity, and the possibilities of productivity increases are low. This article aimed to analyse the possibilities for economic development in the Croatian islands, using a conceptual model inspired by Harris and Todaro’s theoretical outline (Harris & Todaro, 1970; Todaro, 1969). We analysed 18 municipalities located on the islands. The conceptual model classified municipalities by three criteria: unemployment rate, employment growth, and wage. We found 18 island municipalities that have low unemployment, high employment growth, but still low wages, which is a contradiction in neo-classical economic theory. However, it can be explained by the existence of amenities and the tourist industry being low-skilled and therefore having a low wage level. We used population data to analyse demographic trends and the propensity to move from these municipalities. Regardless of the high quality of life on islands, employment possibilities are very limited, particularly for persons with tertiary educational attainment. Therefore, in the past, people born on islands have had to seek education and employment on the mainland. However, telework and digital nomadism have dramatically changed the situation. With digitalisation and flexible work, there are new possibilities for the islands to attract people to both work and spend leisure time. This has led to a number of issues, not least the question of taxation.

Sweden has seen a rise in homelessness alongside its strained housing market. References are increasingly being made to structural problems with housing provision, rather than individual issues. Housing has been organized through the local social services, which are responsible for supporting homeless people. With a foundation in housing studies, this article analyzes the Swedish social services’ challenges and actions in a time in which affordable housing is in shortage, and housing inequality a reality, through the lens of social services. The focus is on the intersection between the regular housing market and housing provision (primary welfare system), the social services needs‐tested support (secondary welfare system), and the non‐profit and for‐profit organizations (tertiary welfare system), with emphasis on the first two. The article is based on interviews with people working for the City of Malmö and illustrates how the housing shortage problem is moved around within the welfare system whilst also showing that social services’ support for homeless individuals appears insufficient. Social services act as a “first line” gatekeeper for those who have been excluded from the regular housing market. Moreover, recently implemented restrictions aim to make sure that the social services do not act as a “housing agency,” resulting in further exclusion from the housing market. The article highlights how the policies of the two welfare systems interact with and counteract each other and finally illustrates how homeless individuals fall between them. It highlights the need to link housing and homelessness in both research and practice to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of housing markets and how homelessness is sustained.

I denna rapport närstuderas den svenska kommunala allmännyttiga bostadssektorn genom att fokusera på fyra samtida motsägelser som allmännyttan står inför. Rapporten föreslår också konturer för en utveckling av allmännyttan och svensk social bostadsförsörjning.

I rapporten lägger författaren fram följande fyra motsägeler för allmännyttan: 1) hög nyproduktion men minskat bestånd, 2) en “dubbel selektivitet” som illustreras genom å ena sidan strikta tillträdeskrav och å andra sidan ökad residualisering, 3) en lokal variation som står i kontrast mot en idé om en sammanhållen nationell bostadsförsörjning och 4) motstridiga tendenser kring att samtidigt motverka och bidra till socioekonomisk segregation.

För att komma tillrätta med de utmaningar som utkristalliseras från dessa utmaningar föreslår författaren en förstärkning av såväl generella som selektiva inslag i svensk bostadsförsörjning, bland annat ett reformerat bostadsbidrag, ett återuppfunnet investeringsstöd och förändringar i fördelningssystemet av hyresrätter.

Segregationen, dess orsaker och dess effetker, är ett vanligt förekommande tema i dagens politiska debatt. Fokus ligger i princip uteslutande på de människor som befinner sig på segregationens förlorarsida. Martin Grander, biträdande lektor i urbana studier och Mikael Stigendal, professor i sociologi – båda vid Malmö universitet – vänder istället blicken mot grupper med högre inkomst.